Snapshots and Bookshelves
by My Sharpie Is Green
Summary: Can you lose something you never had to begin with? CDxHG


I don't own _Harry Potter_. This one kinda sprang out of nowhere, as I'm not a CHr shipper… Oh, and I've never actually read _Persuasion_, but I'd like to, and I'm trying to get my hands on a copy. Please R&R. (This is my 50th fic, by the way)

**.x. Snapshots and Bookshelves .x.**

He had first noticed her in the library when he had gone to research the Triwizard Tournament. She had been looking at similar books and he had asked her where she found them; she pointed him in the right direction and then added that she was done with some of them, if he was interested. He had pulled up a chair and she had asked him if he was planning on entering as he took one of the titles from the towering pile. He responded yes and asked her the same question. She laughed and said no, she was too young, and that she probably wouldn't enter anyways—grand heroics weren't her prowess. "Cedric Diggory, Hufflepuff," he'd told her, reaching his hand out; she shook it, grinning sheepishly. "Hermione Granger, Gryffindor," she'd responded, and he'd been hers from that moment on.

Not long afterwards, he'd spied a mousy-haired Colin Creevey with his camera walking across the courtyard and he'd dashed after him, and he paid him three Galleons for a single photograph of her. When he got it, he couldn't help but think that she was dazzling. It was taken in the sun by the lake, and she was sitting alone but smiling nonetheless. She had a book in her lap and was reading intently, her hair falling down her shoulders. She was beautiful, in every sense of the word.

He spoke to her another time after their first meeting before being named Triwizard Champion. When Dumbledore called his name, he got up and looked around at all his friends, but really he was looking for her. He saw her next to Harry Potter and thought that he locked eyes with her for a moment before he walked towards the headmaster; he continued to watch her the entire time, and he saw her eyes follow him.

He saw her in the library the next day. "Congratulations," she told him and he smiled and thanked her.

"You're friends with Potter, aren't you?"

"Yes," she said defensively.

"Tell me…how'd he do it?"

"He didn't enter himself," she snapped. "Harry's not like that."

"Oh, right. Sorry, I didn't know."

"Well, now you do."

"Do you like him?" The question sprang out of nowhere.

"What?" she asked incredulously.

"Well…do you?"

"Absolutely not! Harry is like a brother to me," she told him, almost repulsed at the idea.

"Just wondering," he told her, feeling better than before.

It continued like this until it came time to find a date to the Yule Ball. Cedric sniffed out a romantic spot to make his proposal; he had grown more and more eager as the days passed and it came closer to the time that he would ask her to the ball until Viktor Krum told him that he would be taking Hermione to the dance. Cedric used his plan on the pretty Cho Chang instead, but went back up to his four-poster to look at his picture of her anyways.

Weeks later, he watched as Hermione and Krum danced, and he saw her argue with her best friend and he realized where her heart truly laid. He kissed Cho Chang in spite of knowing that he'd lost her forever, if you could lose something you'd never had to start with.

He didn't speak to Hermione between the first and second tasks, but he did talk to Harry. He tipped Harry off about how to figure out his egg, hoping that Harry would mention the favor to Hermione and that maybe Hermione would mention it to him. When he cracked the riddle, he wondered how Hermione would react to learning that she was the thing he'd miss most, and when he saw Cho tied to the rock as well, he knew Dumbledore had gotten it wrong.

The last time he interacted with her was a week before the third task. She was in the library alone, a novel in her hands. He pulled up the chair next to her.

"I thought you'd be in here looking up hexes and spells for Potter," he said. She jumped slightly at the sound of his voice.

"I wasn't expecting you," she said.

"Yes, well, I like to surprise people. So, if you're not up to your neck in text books, what are you reading?"

"_Persuasion_, by Jane Austen."

"And what's that about?"

"These two people meet and fall in love, but the timings not right and so they separate, and they see each other again many years later, but they don't know if too much time has passed…" He wondered if perhaps there would be another time for them. "I've read it before. I like to read it when I'm nervous."

He looked intently at her. "What are you nervous about?"

"Harry… The third task… Everything, really."

"What do you mean?"

"Someone entered Harry in this tournament. Someone had a reason to do that. Something's going to happen, I know it." Her voice was unusually soft and strained; she had set down her book and was looking down at her hands, which she was wringing in her lap.

"Hey," he said, taking one of her small hands in his larger ones and squeezing it, "it'll be fine. Nothing will happen to him." She let out a strangled cry, and he simply sat there with her, her hands in his, knowing the entire time he was only a friend.

During the maze he tried desperately to beat Harry to the Cup to impress her, and when it transported them both to the graveyard he couldn't help but wish that he had Hermione's intellect to figure out exactly what had just happened. His blood chilled when he heard the words "Kill the spare" echo through the still night air, and hardly had time for her face to fill his mind's eye before he collapsed, lifeless, to the ground.

He would have been comforted to know that she cried when Harry brought his body back, and that she thought about him a bit after he was gone. It was Cho, however, that his classmates hailed as the love he'd left behind, and all that was left of the almost romance was a single photograph…


End file.
